Tag Archives: Andrew Ross Sorkin

I am watching the film Too Big to Fail based on Andrew Ross Sorkin’s book of the same name. It led me to check out the price of the used book, which has fallen to $1.02, which is low enough that I am willing to buy a copy of the book, particularly since not a penny will go to Andrew Ross Sorkin. The financial analytics displayed in the movie and the book are so poor and dishonest that I need to have a copy by my keyboard as an inspiration to keep trying to cut through the calculated dishonesty about Wall Street pumped out nearly every day in the pages of the New York Times.

The movie starts with the imminent failure of Lehman. It is an astonishingly sympathetic portrait of Wall Street, Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner, and Ben Bernanke. The movie invents a scene in which the Treasury leadership explains “in English” the causes of the crisis to the Treasury PR person. There is not a word about the three fraud epidemics that hyper-inflated the bubble, drove the crisis, and produced the Great Recession. As one expects of a Sorkin tale, it is all about personalities and “great men.” (Women are rare and powerless, even FDIC Chair Sheila Bair.) The movie and book have a patina of financial jargon that Sorkin thinks constitutes analytics, and a nearly total failure to probe the Wall Street BS about the crisis.

Andrew Ross Sorkin is back, so unintentional self-parody is again the order of the day. Wall Street’s sycophant-in-chief, introduces his column with a 98 m.p.h. fastball aimed at the reader’s chin.

This isn’t meant to scare you, but let’s consider the absolute worst-case scenarios of “Brexit.”

Sorkin’s column then presents his specific example of his absolute worst-case scenario. See if you can spot what is missing from that scenario.

Consider this: Italy’s government is considering pumping as much as $45 billion into its banking system after the Brexit vote. Shares of the biggest Italian banks have fallen more than 20 percent since the results of the vote were announced. And Italian banks are considered particularly vulnerable because they hold hundreds of billions of euros in bad loans. If Brexit forces a material economic slowdown across the Continent, Italy’s banks — without a rescue plan — could significantly suffer.

OK, Italy’s elite bankers made “hundreds of billions of euros in bad loans” that are still on their books nine years after the onset of the Great Recession. That should have prompted deep analysis by Sorkin about why the bankers made the loans, what role they caused in producing Italy’s crises, and why the regulators have allowed the bankers to “extend and pretend” the bad loans as if they were good loans for nine years.

Andrew Ross Sorkin has written a column lamenting that “For a Generalist, ‘Too Big to Fail’ May Be Too Tricky to Judge” about the district court opinion finding in favor of MetLife on the question of whether it would pose a system risk were it to fail. Sorkin runs the NYT’s “Deal Book,” which is supposed to represent the paper’s specialized expertise with regard to Wall Street. His column demonstrates that one of the areas of expertise required to understand Wall Street is legal, and that it is beyond his understanding despite having “read hundreds of pages of legal briefs from both sides, and talked to company and government officials and outside experts….”

Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote two related columns only two weeks apart, but ignored his first column in writing his second. The May 15, 2015 report by the University of Notre Dame on the results of its survey of financial sector participants in the U.S. and the UK was the subject of Sorkin’s May 18, 2015 column entitled “Many on Wall Street Say It Remains Untamed.” “Untamed” is a word with a positive connotation that Sorkin chose as his euphemism in his self-appointed role as apologist-in-chief for the banksters. Here is the report’s summary.

I want to give a hat tip to a recent Wall Street Journal article that brought to my attention two damning admissions by JPMorgan’s (JPM) CEO and Chairman of the Board, Jamie Dimon. The irony is that Dimon was lulled into making these admissions because he was basking in the perfect calm created by the confluence of Sorkin’s and CNBC’s storied sycophancy at the one place on earth where elite bankers feel most loved, honored, and protected – the annual meeting of the ultra-wealthy in Davos, Switzerland. Sorkin was the only interviewer, so Dimon faced no risk of tough questions. It may well have been this perfect setting that caused Dimon to let slip the mask and reveal two illustrative sins of elite bankers reported in the WSJ article.

No one expects Andrew Ross Sorkin’s slavish “Deal Book” lackeys to demand that the elite Wall Street bankers whose frauds drove the financial crisis be imprisoned, but the slavishness to the banks revealed when major news stories emerge continues to irritate if not surprise. A recent embarrassment can be found here.

The “Deal Book” Spinmeisters

The context of the NYT article was the expected settlement between DOJ, various states, and JPMorgan. The spin comes fast and hard, which would be great in cricket (or quarks) but, sadly, exemplifies the national paper of record’s “Deal Book” devotional pages. The “Deal Book” shows that cricket masters can impart very different spins. The first substantive paragraph’s spin is to minimize JPMorgan’s fraud.

This is the third installment in my Sorkin Saga. The saga was prompted by Andrew Ross Sorkin’s (ARS) video in which he “outed” himself as the leader of an undercover effort by the journalists of the New York Time’s“Dealbook” and CNBC to discover and “out” the “criminal element” among the elite bankers. Here is the key passage from his video.

“If there’s one question that I get just about more than any other, ‘So why didn’t anybody go to jail, and did nobody try?’ And there’s an answer to that too.

A lot of people had an incentive to try to find a way to bring not justice, but to put people away. Prosecutors, law enforcement, journalists; it would have been a better story. But for the last five years we’ve tried, all of us have tried, to find that criminal element. And while things happened that were upsetting and frustrating and unethical and immoral sadly, it may not have been criminal.”

In yesterday’s column I discussed the fact that Andrew Ross Sorkin (ARS) of the New York Timesand CNBC has unmasked himself in a video entitled “Two Myths and One Reality” as the scourge of Wall Street who had worked tirelessly for five years to find the “criminal element” that caused the financial crisis.

“If there’s one question that I get just about more than any other, ‘So why didn’t anybody go to jail, and did nobody try?’ And there’s an answer to that too.

A lot of people had an incentive to try to find a way to bring not justice, but to put people away. Prosecutors, law enforcement, journalists; it would have been a better story. But for the last five years we’ve tried, all of us have tried, to find that criminal element.”

Andrew Ross Sorkin (ARS), long believed to be the sycophants’ sycophant who composes his odes to elite bank CEOs from his perch at the New York Times and CNBC has unmasked himself in a video entitled “Two Myths and One Reality.”

“If there’s one question that I get just about more than any other, ‘So why didn’t anybody go to jail, and did nobody try?’ And there’s an answer to that too.

A lot of people had an incentive to try to find a way to bring not justice, but to put people away. Prosecutors, law enforcement, journalists; it would have been a better story. But for the last five years we’ve tried, all of us have tried, to find that criminal element.”

ARS revealed in his video that he has posed as the modern-day leader of the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel, the undercover group of English aristocrats, led by an English baronet (“one to command, and nineteen to obey”) who saved French aristocrats from the Great Terror. The twist is that ARS’ League is composed of financial journalists who pose as sycophants and that the modern-day French aristocrats are the elite bankers whose misconduct caused the Great Recession. The purpose of ARS’ deception was to lure the elite bankers into admitting their misconduct so that they could be held accountable rather than aiding French aristocrats’ efforts to escape accountability. ARS was the anti-Scarlet Pimpernel, the aristocrat posing as the friend of the aristocrats in order to “find that criminal element.”